Trent stood for a moment like a man turned to stone. Alive! Monty alive! The impossibility of the thing came like a flash of relief to him. The man was surely on the threshold of death when he had left him, and the age of miracles was past.
“You're talking like a fool, Da Souza. Do you mean to take me in with an old woman's story like that?”
“There's no old woman's story about what I've told you,” Da Souza snarled. “The man's alive and I can prove it a dozen times over. You were a fool and a bungler.”
Trent thought of the night when he had crept back into the bush and had found no trace of Monty, and gradually there rose up before him a lurid possibility Da Souza's story was true. The very thought of it worked like madness in his brains. When he spoke he strove hard to steady his voice, and even to himself it sounded like the voice of one speaking a long way off.
“Supposing that this were true,” he said, “what is he doing all this time? Why does he not come and claim his share?”
Da Souza hesitated. He would have liked to have invented another reason, but it was not safe. The truth was best.
“He is half-witted and has lost his memory. He is working now at one of the Basle mission-places near Attra.”
“And why have you not told me this before?”
Da Souza shrugged his shoulders. “It was not necessary,” he said. “Our interests were the same, it was better for you not to know.”
“He remembers nothing, then?”